Cat With A Clue

Chapter 4

“So,” Lindsey Wolverson said that evening at the Round Table. “Your aunt tells me you have a knack for leadership.”

I sent a panicked glance to my left at Ash, but he was busy sprinkling malt vinegar onto his fries and wasn’t paying attention to either me or his mother, whom I was meeting for the first time.

Aunt Frances had known Lindsey for years, but I’d never met her. My aunt had told me of backyard picnics and dinner parties and watching Ash and his sister grow from roly-poly toddlers into adulthood, but she hadn’t mentioned that his mother was so flat-out gorgeous that every person in the room—men and women alike—stared at her with dropped jaw. Not only that, but her chic yet casual attire was more elegant than anything I’d ever owned in my life.

It was a little intimidating, and I wish I’d known ahead of time. Then again, given Ash’s innate good looks, I should probably have guessed something like this was possible. But mathematics wasn’t my strong suit and I didn’t always put two and two together.

So I smiled, added more salt to my fries than I really wanted, and struggled for something to say that didn’t sound completely stupid. “I . . . I . . . uh . . .” I gave up. Stupid it would have to be.

Ash gave his fries one last dollop of malt vinegar, then screwed the top back onto the bottle. “You should see her with Sheriff Richardson. You’d think they’d been buds since day one.”

Lindsey’s perfectly plucked eyebrows went up. “Kit Richardson? That woman has awed me for years. She frightens men who have United States senators on their speed dial. Good for you. How did you do it?”

Basically, I had no idea, but it probably helped that I wasn’t from Chilson. I hadn’t known I was supposed to be nervous around the sheriff and had assumed she was like the other people I’d met from her office: helpful, courteous, and competent. Then again, it could have been because I’d knocked on the sheriff’s front door early one morning, and it was hard to think of someone in terms of fearsome starch once you’d seen her in a ratty bathrobe.

I was about to explain parts of that when I accidentally caught the look on the face of a male passing our booth. He was staring at Lindsey, jaw dropped, eyes goggled, and there might even have been a small trail of drool leaking out one corner of his mouth, although that could have been my imagination. “I . . .” But whatever I’d been about to say had gone clean out of my head. “I . . . I . . .”

Lindsey’s smile went from friendly to fixed.

I stared at the food on my plate. A burger and fries, all of which was rapidly growing cold and unappealing, but since I was losing my appetite even more rapidly, that didn’t matter.

She hated me. My new boyfriend’s mom hated me, and I hadn’t uttered more than half a dozen words. A new record!

“How’s business?” Ash asked. “Busy?”

Lindsey paused, her forkful of grilled chicken salad halfway to her mouth. “Do you realize that I’ve had this firm for nearly twenty years? And they said it wouldn’t last.”

Ash laughed. “Well, maybe that’s what Dad said right after the divorce. I always knew you’d be a success.”

She smiled at him fondly. “I just hired another employee. Who knew financial consulting would be so lucrative?”

My misery deepened. Not only was she beautiful, but she was smart and successful and could do math. There was no way she was ever going to approve of a mousy little librarian dating her son. Especially one who couldn’t put two and two together and get a reality into which I would never, ever belong.

I picked up a French fry and thought about eating it, but its coating of salt crystals glinted in the light. While it was my opinion that fries had to have a certain amount of salt to make them edible, there was also a point at which too much salt made them inedible, and these fries had reached that point halfway through my use of the saltshaker. Poor fries, doomed to end their life in a garbage bag, never to be—

“Minnie?” Ash nudged me with his elbow. “Did you hear my mom’s question?”

“Oh.” I blinked at him, then at the stunning woman sitting across from me. “Sorry. I . . . I . . .”

Thankfully, she cut into my repetitious soliloquy. “I hear you had a traumatic experience the other morning at the library.”

Not nearly as traumatic as it had been for Andrea Vennard, but the thought was a kind one. I nodded. And since I didn’t want to relive the experience any more times than my stupid brain was already forcing me to do, I returned to contemplating my dinner.

There was a pause. A long one.

“Well,” Lindsey said, and though I’d known her for less than an hour, even I could hear the brittleness in her voice. “Have the two of you seen any movies lately?”

I glanced at Ash, who was in the middle of taking a large bite from his hamburger. He wasn’t going to be any help. I looked at Lindsey and shook my head. “I—”

Ash’s cell phone burst into life. He shifted his burger to one hand and pulled out his cell with the other. With a huge effort that happily didn’t end with the necessity for someone to jump up and perform the Heimlich maneuver, he swallowed, then said, “Sorry—I have to take this,” and thumbed the phone to life. “Wolverson.” As he listened, he flicked glances at his mother, at me, at his food. “Okay. I’ll be right there.”

In one smooth movement, he slid the phone back into his pocket and stood. “Sorry, Mom. Sorry, Minnie. That was Detective Inwood. He needs me to—”

But his mom was already waving him away. “Duty calls. I understand,” she said as he leaned down to give her a kiss on the cheek.

He looked my way, gave me a large wink that his mother couldn’t see, and left me alone with her.

This time the pause was even longer.

“Are you a reader?” I asked.

“Of what?”

“Books. Magazines. Newspapers.” Anything, really, because if we could find some common ground, surely I would figure out something to say to this woman.

“Most of my reading is business oriented,” she said. “Books on economics and financial forecasting. Trade magazines—that kind of thing.”

“No fiction?”

Lindsey looked at me with an expression I couldn’t interpret. “My father always said that fiction was the refuge of the unhappy. That readers of fiction were looking for an escape.”

“But . . . but . . .” Then I stopped, because I did not want to get into an argument with my boyfriend’s mother the first time I met her.

I turned my attention back to my hamburger, mainly because if I was eating, I couldn’t be expected to talk. The resulting silence was awkward. With a capital A.

“Ran out on you, did he?” Sabrina, my favorite waitress at the Round Table, stopped by to top off our water glasses. “You ladies need anything else?”

“Just the check, please,” Lindsey said. “And I’ll take that right now.”

“Gotcha.”

Sabrina pulled the correct slip from her apron pocket without looking. As soon as she slid it onto the table, Lindsey picked it up and slid out of the booth. “Thank you. I’ll pay up front. Minnie, it was a pleasure meeting you.” She smiled politely and was gone.

“Wow,” Sabrina said, watching her go. “That was Ash’s mom, right? She’s gorgeous.”

I pushed my plate away. Ash’s mother was everything I was not and never would be. Tall. Straight-haired. Articulate. Financially successful. Stunningly beautiful. Not to mention articulate.

Sighing, I started to slide out of the booth. I almost asked Sabrina how her husband, Bill, was doing. They’d met here at the Round Table and had been married less than a year. Then I decided to ask the next time I was in. Right now, all I wanted was to go home and snuggle up to my cat.

* * *

“How could I have been such an idiot?” I asked.

“Mrr,” Eddie replied.

“Well, yeah,” I said, pulling the lap blanket up over my legs. We were sitting outside on the houseboat’s front deck. The sun was slipping down into the horizon and the temperature was dropping. “Everyone’s an idiot some of the time. Except you, of course.”

“Mrr.”

“You’re welcome.” I patted his head. “But I’m relatively self-confident. I haven’t had major self-esteem issues since I talked Mom into letting me get contact lenses.”

“Mrr.”

“Right. So, why tonight? Why couldn’t I get out more than three words in a row?” I thought back to the nonconversation, then corrected myself. “More than one word in a row.”

Eddie stood, stretched, and then walked up my body and flopped onto my chest. “Mrr.” A front paw reached out to rest on my chin.

“When you do that, it makes it hard to talk,” I told him.

“Mrr.”

I laughed softly. “That’s the point, is what you’re saying? That I should just enjoy the sunset and your company and not worry so much about one dinner?”

“Mrr!”

So I stopped talking and concentrated on enjoying a cat’s affection and the gloriousness of a summer sunset. And, long before the sky went completely dark, I’d put the Doomsday Dinner to the back of my mind.

Well, almost.

* * *

The next morning, life at the library was more or less back to normal. Work was piling up on my desk, Josh and Holly were trying to pin me down on when I’d turn in my application for library director, and the carpet guys I’d contacted had come and gone, leaving behind nothing but a faint new-carpet smell and a swath of carpet that held no bad memories.

Yes, there was still a killer on the loose and, yes, I was still disturbed by the fact that I had no idea how he—or she—had infiltrated my library, but I was determined not to lose my focus on the multitude of tasks that needed to be done. Because in spite of last night’s miserable dinner, and no matter what Lindsey Wolverson must think of my character, I was a capable human being and people relied on me to do my job.

And in a just world, which would be where hardworking and almost-always-kind people were given dignity and grace, when one of those hardworking and kind person’s cell phone rang, her brain would have used enough of itself to think about how she was going to answer rather than just pick up the phone absently and say, “Busy. What’s up?”

There was a short pause. A male throat cleared itself. “Ms. Hamilton?”

I sat up, blinking away from the invoices on my desk whose numbers didn’t match what the accounting program on my computer was telling me. “Detective Inwood. Good morning.” I darted a quick glance at the computer screen. Yes, still morning. Excellent. While I may not have been paying full attention to what my phone had been trying to tell me, at least I had the time of day correct by three full minutes. “What can I do for you?”

“The Sheriff, Deputy Wolverson, and I have decided to make you aware of the results of Ms. Vennard’s autopsy.”

“Oh.” Did I really want to know this? No, I did not. I’d read far too many thrillers and seen far too many television shows that featured autopsies to want to hear any grisly details regarding a real human being. “Thanks,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure I don’t—”

“Ms. Vennard,” he went on, paying zero attention to my wishes and desires, “was not killed by the knife.”

“She wasn’t?” Once again, I pictured the silver handle. “Then why was it there?”

“We do not know. The cause of death was strangulation.”

That made no sense.

“The knife found in the body,” he said, “was an X-Acto knife. The blade was thin and about an inch long.”

“A what kind of knife?”

He repeated the word. “It’s a brand name. Used by artists, woodworkers, and any number of hobbyists.”

“So not unusual.”

“Not at all. But it’s puzzling,” the detective said. “Ms. Vennard’s fingerprints were sharp and clear on the handle. The lab’s opinion is that no great force was exerted on the handle other than by Ms. Vennard. In addition, the X-Acto injury was postmortem.”

I suppressed a shudder. “Why would she be in the library with an X-Acto knife?”

“That’s why I called,” Inwood said. “I’d hoped that as the acting library director, you’d have some insight.”

“Sorry. It doesn’t make any sense to me, either.”

“Well,” he said heavily, “we will do our best to keep all avenues of investigation open.”

It was a phrase I’d heard before. “Do you have any new ideas about how Andrea got in the building?” I asked.

The working theory was that she’d walked into the library when it was open and simply hid. Gareth left at one in the morning, and searching for stowaways certainly wasn’t anything he’d ever needed to do.

“Not yet,” he said. “No signs of forced entry on any doors or windows; no record of any missing keys.”

The possibility of a missing key would have been high in the old building, which hadn’t had new locks since it had been built decades earlier, but Stephen had instituted a strict key-tracking system when we’d moved to the new building, and for once I was grateful for his persnicketiness.

But this scenario also meant that Andrea might have opened the door to her killer, which made—

A sturdy woman barged into my office, tossing back her short brown hair. “Minnie, I need to talk to you.”

I held up my index finger and pointed to the phone. “Is there anything else?” I asked Detective Inwood. “Someone’s just come in that I need to talk to.” Didn’t want to, but would obviously need to, since she was settling into my guest chair, no invitation required.

“If anything further develops,” Inwood said, “I’ll let you know.”

I thumbed off the phone and looked up. “What’s up, Denise?”

Denise Slade was fiftyish and the current president of the Friends of the Library. Just before last Thanksgiving, her husband had died tragically. I was trying to remember that, was trying to allow her time to work through her grief and come to grips with the loss of her life partner, but doing so was easier some days than others.

She pointed her index finger straight at me. “I have a problem, and I want to know what you’re going to do about it.”

I folded my hands on my desk. Denise had a lot of problems, but it wasn’t likely that she was coming to me for advice on how to win friends and influence people. Then again, if she was interested in doing that, there were some books I could recommend.

“Can I get you some coffee?” I asked.

“If Kelsey made it, then yes. Otherwise, no. She’s the only one who makes a decent brew around here. The rest of you are a bunch of coffee wimps.”

“Holly made the last pot.”

Denise shuddered. “I’d rather go without.”

Then that’s what she’d do. I smiled, trying my best to stay friendly and composed. “What’s the problem?”

Her frown turned into a glower. “The book-sale room.”

“What about it?” For eons, the Friends of the Library had been running a book sale. In the old library they’d been shoehorned into a basement room little bigger than a closet, but now they were in a spacious area on the second floor with room to grow. Donated books and books we took out of circulation were sold, and all the profits went to benefit the library.

The Friends purchased books for us, hosted author events for us, held children’s events for us, and lent a helping hand whenever one was needed. I didn’t want to think what running the library would be like without the Friends, and I was deeply grateful for everything they did.

“It’s a mess,” Denise said. “A huge mess, and no one is admitting to having done it.”

This wasn’t a huge surprise. A mess by Denise’s standards would have been a comfortable clutter to anyone else. I’d once heard her berate a volunteer for walking past a shelf of sale books without straightening them to be flush with the front edge.

“How much of a mess are you talking about?” I asked.

“Come see,” she said, and shoved herself out of the chair and to her feet.

Not for the first time, I realized that I hadn’t given Stephen enough credit. When he’d been here, he’d been in charge of soothing Denise’s ruffled feathers, and I was now realizing it must have taken more time and patience than I’d ever dreamed. I made a silent apology to my former boss and remained seated.

“Sorry, Denise,” I said. “I don’t have time right now.” I nodded at the piles of papers on my desk. “Give me half an hour.”

She huffed out a massive sigh. “And here I thought you were going to be a better director than Stephen. You’re just as bad as he was at meeting the needs of the Friends.”

Though it was disheartening to be compared to a man whom I’d never thought had an ounce of management skills, I was learning. Slowly, but I was learning. “I’ll be up in half an hour.” I smiled politely and went back to my papers.

Half an hour later, on the dot, I walked into the book-sale room. “Wow,” I said, looking around. “You weren’t kidding.”

Denise rolled her eyes. “I told you, didn’t I? A mess.”

For once, she was making a huge understatement. Books were on the windowsills. Books were on the tables. Books were scattered across the floor. It looked as if a huge wind had rushed through the room, sucking every book off a shelf and spitting them out every which way. It was a horrendous mess.

“You’d better stop,” I told Denise.

“What?” She was crouching on the floor, picking up books, and sliding them onto the nearest shelf. “Don’t be ridiculous. We have to get this room back in shape before tomorrow. That’s sale day, you know.”

Once upon a time I’d known when the Friends opened the room to the public for sales, but Denise had switched it around so much the past few months that I never told anyone the sales days without running upstairs and checking the dates taped to the door.

“The police need to look at this,” I said.

“Police? That’s nuts. This was vandalism, pure and simple. Some kids snuck up here and, without Stephen in his office down the hall, they had time to do all this.”

I frowned. “Haven’t you heard what happened?”

“Heard what?” she said crossly. “I’ve been downstate visiting friends. Drove up this morning and came straight to the library.”

Oh, dear. If I’d had to make a list of the people who’d heard about the murder ten minutes after I’d called the police, Denise’s name would have been at the top. She was related to half the people in Chilson and had gone to school with the other half. That she hadn’t heard about Andrea Vennard might well be a sign that the world was about to end. I hoped not, though, because I had things to do. Like grow older.

I walked across the room and gently took the books out of her hands. “You’d better sit down. There’s something I need to tell you.”

Since murder had struck her own family less than a year ago, I thought she might take the news hard, and she did. She dissolved into sobbing tears after I’d told her a woman had been killed in the library, but after she’d recovered, I called the city police and they sent up the nice Officer Joel Stowkowski. He looked around, took notes, snapped photos, checked doors and windows, and offered a lot of sympathy, but he hadn’t been able to promise much in the way of retribution for anyone who had the temerity to damage books in a library, even if they weren’t technically library books.

It was all kinds of rotten, and I was glad to head home to the marina that evening and curl up with Eddie and a book. But that night the wind came up, slapping waves against the houseboat and rocking me into dreams that featured earthquakes and landslides. Then, as the dark edged into a gray, dreary, windswept morning, the heavens opened up and the rain came down.

Eddie and I sat at the dining table, me on the bench, Eddie on the back of the bench looking out at the wet world.

“It’s a bookmobile day,” I reminded him. “What do you think?”

There was no response from my feline friend.

“You don’t have to go, you know,” I said. “People will understand.” Which wasn’t exactly true. Once, last winter, Eddie hadn’t been feeling well and I’d left him at the boardinghouse instead of dragging him out into the cold. I’d had to explain his bookmobile absence, and he’d received more Get Well cards than I’d received Christmas cards. Not that it was a contest, but still.

Eddie jumped onto the table and started to stick his head into my cereal bowl.

“Hey!” I pulled what was left of my breakfast away from him. “What do you think you’re doing? This is mine. Yours is on the floor. You know, in the cat-food bowl? And get off the table. You don’t belong up there.”

He gave me a look, then started a slow ooze onto the floor.

“Faster,” I said, giving his hind legs a slight shove.

“Mrr!” he said just before he landed.

“Yeah, well, back at you.”

When I didn’t hear anything else, I turned and saw that he was sitting on top of his cat carrier. “Ready to go?” I asked.

Cat fashion, he managed to rearrange his feet without moving, staring at me the whole time.

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

“Mrr!”

I laughed out loud. I was almost sorry I’d had Eddie fixed, because if I’d been able to find a girl cat who could tolerate him, their kittens would have been something extraordinary.

“Then again,” I told him a few minutes later, as I fastened my car’s passenger’s-side seat belt around the cat carrier, “having an entire litter of you might be too much. Yes, I know that none of your offspring could possibly be an improvement on your own unique species, but just imagine four or five or six little Eddies, all trying to talk to me at the same time.”

Months ago, I’d decided that Eddie had to be one of a kind and named him Felis eddicus. Very like the more common Felis domesticus, but not quite.

“What kind of cat would be your mate of choice?” I asked. “Tortoiseshell? Another tabby? A Siamese? How about a Scottish fold? They’re way cute.”

“Mrr.”

“Okay, no Scottish folds.” I glanced over. My cat was flopped on his back, wedging himself into a corner of the carrier, waving his legs in the air. “Though a better question might be, what self-respecting lady cat would have anything to do with you?”

“Mrr!”

“Yeah, whatever.” Grinning, I squinted through the rain. “You’re out of practice, pal. As I recall, the last time you talked to a female feline, there was a lot of fur flying and you weren’t the clear victor.” Last winter, my aunt Frances’s new love interest, Otto, had brought over his adorable little gray cat, hoping the two would become friends, but all had not gone well.

I flicked on the turn signal and made a right into the library’s back parking lot, which was the only place Stephen had allowed me to site a garage for the bookmobile. It was a very small garage, not much bigger than the bookmobile itself. This made hefting books back and forth to the library more than a small chore, but at the time I’d accepted his conditions willingly, because it was either accept or not have a bookmobile at all.

“If that estate ever gets settled,” I told Eddie, “what do you think the chances are that I’ll get to use some of that money for a real garage?”

“Mrr.”

“You think so?” Because he’d sounded optimistic. “That would be wonderful. And maybe the new Stephen will let me . . .” I trailed off. Holly and Josh and Donna and Kelsey and everyone else on the staff were still after me to turn in my application. “I could be the new Stephen. What do you think of that?”

“Mrr!”

I frowned. “It’s not that unlikely. I’m doing an okay job so far. It’s not that much of a stretch to—”

“MRR!” Eddie howled, banging his whole self against the carrier’s wall, thumping so hard that I winced.

“Will you stop that? What’s wrong with—”

It was then that I noticed the people door to the bookmobile garage wasn’t closed up tight. In fact, it wasn’t closed at all. I braked to a sudden stop.

There wasn’t a single, solitary chance I’d left that door unlocked, let alone standing wide-open. There were things I routinely forgot, such as going to the dentist every six months and making sure I dusted the top of the kitchen cabinets, but I would never, ever forget to shut and lock the bookmobile’s garage door.

So there were two possibilities. One, last night’s wind had broken the door open. But since the door had remained firmly shut throughout the massive storm of a few weeks ago, when hundred-mile-an-hour, straight-line winds had rushed through town, that didn’t seem likely. Unfortunately, the other possibility was far more troubling.

My heart beat fast as I put the car in park and opened the driver’s door. I had to find out what had happened, I had to see what was—

“Mrr!”

I looked at my cat.

“Mrr!” he said again, glaring at me.

“You’re right,” I muttered, sitting down. “It would be stupid to go barging in there.”

I reached down, pulled my phone out of my backpack’s outer pocket, and dialed three numbers. Then I took a deep breath and unclenched my jaw so that I’d be able to respond when the dispatcher asked about my emergency.

“I’d like to report a break-in,” I said.